nuffnang

Friday, June 6, 2014

U.S. criticizes racist North Korean screed against Obama

Many are astonished
by the racist North Korean
screed against Obama as reported. This has never happened before.

The White House on
Thursday sharply condemned a lengthy and racist North Korean screed against
President Obama, calling the rhetoric from Pyongyang “particularly ugly and
disrespectful.”

The rebuke came in response to a recently published
diatribe by North Korea calling Obama a “clown,” a “dirty fellow” and somebody
who “does not even have the basic appearances of a human being.”

Another part of the tirade declared, “It would be perfect
for Obama to live with a group of monkeys in the world’s largest African
natural zoo and lick the breadcrumbs thrown by spectators.”

Propriety has never
been a part of North Korean rhetoric, but rarely has Pyongyang so ferociously —
and personally — attacked a U.S. leader, in this case pulling language right
out of the American 1850s. The attack seems unabashed, except for one thing:
Unlike most articles published by the North’s state-run news agency, this one
wasn’t translated into English.

“He is a crossbreed with unclear blood,” the North says.

And later: Obama “still has the figure of a monkey while
the human race has evolved through millions of years.”

The diatribe, published May 2, almost escaped
foreign attention. But Joshua Stanton, whoblogs regularlyabout
the North’s viciousness and rights violations, uncovered the Korean-only piece,
as well as a separate, milder article that was translated into English and in
which Obama was called a “wicked black monkey.”

The Korean-only piece (headlined “Divine retribution for
the juvenile delinquent Obama!”) featured four lengthy passages, each
attributed to a regular citizen. In the North, quotations of citizens are
state-sanctioned and often spoon-fed by the government’s propaganda department,
analysts say.

In some instances,
North Korea’s verbal attacks can be milked for amusement, their outrage
directed at “imperialist lackeys” and “thrice-cursed ­stooges.” But when North
Korea talks about race, it’s almost always important — and telling about the
state ideology.

Some academics — most notablyB.R. Myers—
argue that North Koreans fundamentally have a “race-based” worldview, showing
more similarity to fascist Japan during World War II than Joseph Stalin’s
Soviet Union. Myers condenses North Korea’s state orthodoxy into a sentence:
“The Korean people are too pure blooded, and therefore too virtuous, to survive
in this evil world without a great parental leader.”

That notion, of course, has been contorted to allow the
most non-parental kind of leadership, but North Korea still goes to alarming
lengths to maintain its racial purity. North Korean women often cross into
China looking for work or an escape; if those women are impregnated and later
forcibly repatriated to the North, they are subject to either forced abortions
or infanticide.

The United Nations said in a recent human rights report
that this practice points “to an underlying belief in a ‘pure Korean race’ in
the DPRK to which mixed race children (of ethnic Koreans) are considered a
contamination of its ‘pureness.’ ” The report referred to North Korea by
its official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.